Coach of The Norwegian Train: Olav Aleksander Bu O

The Rich Roll Podcast. These guys are pin cushions. You're pricking them all the time. They got patches all over their body. There's data flowing out of their eyeballs and you're pouring trackers down their throats and isotope water like it's insane. Several weeks ago, we released an incredibly popular episode featuring the triathlon world champions Hailing from Norway, Christian Blumenfeld and Gustav Eaton. And despite them earnestly answering

every question I asked, I was still left wondering how do they do it? Why are they so much better, consistently better than the competition? Well, here today with answers is the coach of the Norwegian train himself, Olaf Alexander Booth, or as I like to refer to him, the money ball mad scientist mastermind of endurance mastery. We have got a lot of attention of how we have

implemented sensors, instruments, technology, science. But one thing that maybe doesn't get so much attention is also the human aspect of it. Olaf is a sports scientist. He's a physicist and elite coach who helped to devise a protocol of testing and performance optimization grounded in the scientific method that is achieving undisputable real world results in the form of an electric metals and triathlon world championship victories. The

same way that I expect the best from Christian and Gustav. I can't expect less from myself. In today's Hailing Anticipated Conversation, we cover Olaf's background, the specific protocols that he has instituted that have garnered so much success. Understanding how we can work on different things to excel performance. His fundamental laws of energy in training and so much more. You can always come there with as much

details, as much data you really want to, but if people don't buy into it, if they don't trust you, if they don't feel like it. Nothing's going to work. Exactly. This one is sure to be a must listen for any and all athletes out there. Both professional and recreational. It's lined with actionable takeaways and is very much a part two to the episode with Christian and

Gustav. So if you haven't yet checked that one out, I would highly recommend it. And it's coming right up, but first. We're brought to you today by Athletic Greens. Most people who listen to this podcast already care about what they eat since that is such a consistent theme of this show. But even the best among us failed to hit that super pure whole food bullseye every

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between me and a love Alexander Booth. Booth love. It's finally a pleasure to meet you in person. Thank you for doing this. We're recording this on the heels of having sat down with Christian and Gustav. And now we're going to dive deep into the science. What's really happening in Bergen? What is this Norwegian equation that you have unlocked that is rewriting the record books in triathlon?

So much to talk to you about today. But I guess the first question is, what's the most important thing to do? What's the most important thing to open it up is, how did you make these guys so good? This is what everyone wants to know. I think we are actually on our past two words on easier answer. But unfortunately it's not an easy answer just yet.

Because I think on the one side of course what we have got a lot of attention over the last years is how we have implemented sensors, instruments, technology, science. But one thing that's important is that we have that maybe doesn't get so much attention is also that there is a big portion of it. Or maybe still the majority of the portion of it still is also

the human aspect of it. And that's how it's going to be. Coaching will still be for many years. Decades maybe even big parts, just human interaction. But of course what science and technology helps us to do is to start to become more aware of things that really matters for each individual. Right. So you're known as the data guy. You've got an engineering background. You don't have

a background in triathlon. You kind of entered the world of endurance sports with a bit of a beginner's mind, but with this kind of understanding of how data sets could be powerful in up leveling, what we understand about human physiology and performance. And we're going to get into all of those techniques because they're so fascinating. But to kind of echo what you just said, just mentioned

amidst this conversation about what you're doing with these athletes and how that's differentiating their performances from the rest of the pack, what kind of gets missed or is underappreciated is the importance of the human element. And what I would call culture, right. You're working very intensely with a small group of athletes. And none of the data sets are going to make any difference. If these guys

don't get along, if their mindset isn't right, if they aren't on the same page and receptive to what you're trying to teach. So let's start with the culture piece. Yeah. Um, I think the very fundament of everything is culture and exactly that I'm also very fortunate because I've been in a place where I met a lot of good people that also took me on a journey

and brought me where I am. Today as well and allowed me to develop both as a human, but also into the sports of track on, for example, actually, I'm not that. The funny thing is, I'm not that interested in sports itself. That's not really my passion. My passion is more actually humans or let's say what I don't doubt today, peak finding peak human performance. I think

that could be in many, many different places. But if you don't have the culture, the habits, the work ethics. And I think also the passion for each other, then you can always come there with as much detail, as much data you really want to. But if people don't buy into it, if they don't trust you, if they don't feel like it, then nothing's going to work.

Exactly. Yeah. So that is for me, the very fundament that also one of the things that maybe I don't communicate too much about it externally, but one thing that always is my biggest worry, especially when you have two such three athletes like Christian and Gustav, that on the one side, there are in a unique position where they are able to train against each other with each

other every day. And they know their strength and weaknesses. But that means also when they come to the competition, they know also what they have, who they have to win over. And I think that that is a stronger position than go into competition and don't know who you are going to compete against. Yeah. So for me, that we together have a really good relationship, maybe one

of the things that place the most with my emotions too. It's no small feat. I mean, just having spent a couple hours with them, obviously things didn't go Christians way in Kona and Gustav finally got what he's been searching for all along. Christian historically, the person who has been a little bit more successful and had more of the limelight on him. And you can't help but

think like I was wondering, like, are these guys still going to be friends? Like, how does this work? Like, how are they going to move forward as training partners, as roommates, etc. Two people who spend all their time together. And the tone and the tenor is set by the culture that you're trying to create for this small intimate group of athletes who are really trying to

do things that no human being has ever done. Like inevitably, you would think there's going to be a culture clash. Like there can only be one alpha. Like, how is this going to play out and to see their affection for each other and to really understand. Like, oh, their bond is deeper than race results. That doesn't come easy. And that is, you know, unusual. Yeah. I

think, of course, there are many ways to manage this or as a group or where we have different roles. But one thing that I try to guide this a little bit from the sideline or let's say a little bit more, not so visible. I have, of course, the talks. We have actually quite a lot of discussions. Or not, I wouldn't say discussions, but more conversations around

values, values in life, what really matters. Who do we want to be? And that also boils down very much to, uh, to priorities, whether you actually decide to spend your, your thoughts throughout the day, weeks and so on. That's also very much affected by what kind of people do we surround ourselves with. And for me, it's very important that we always surround us. You can always

find fascinating people that have done extreme things and other things. But maybe that values doesn't necessarily align with or values. Doesn't mean that their values are wrong. But it's not, it's not, it doesn't align necessarily with or values. And for me, the most important thing is that is to be a good human. It's a good human. Nothing is worth anything unless, uh, this is a good

thing. And that is that if you win a gold medal and this gold medal or that competition, you're competing and has no value to anybody else. That gold medal suddenly have no value at all. The reason for why something has a value is because the society around us really value it. And that's why also it's so important for me that on one side, we are individuals,

but on the other side to we, we only really have a value. If we have a value for the society around us. Yeah. Right. So that means also that when we choose who we surround us, it's important that we always surround us with people that have values that are nurturing, uh, nurturing or not necessarily consciously. But it's more like you're being in an atmosphere, where you

pick up consciously and subconsciously things that contributes to, to bring it or making a better human. And that means, like, also to, to the question of alphas. And that is that we don't spend very much time on focusing on who is the alpha or not. We can joke about it. I think that that's the way we're doing it. Last time we made a joke about that

must have been probably a year ago, one and a half year ago, because I think that in a group, if you have a lot of attention to who is the alpha and or there's discussion about alpha or let's say being a leader and these kind of things, there will always be a fight for this. There will always be a rivalry for this. But this is not

really what is important. What is really important for me is more, let's say, each of our own development. And as long as we always progress. And we take care of the people around us. And we actually will achieve our goals. So how does that translate into tactics, strategies and practices? Like I'm thinking about the applicability of these principles to the coach that's listening to the CEO

or the executive. Anybody who has to lead and empower teams of people. How does it play out on a daily basis in terms of curating that type of culture? It's a time to develop, but to maintain a habit, as long as you make sure that then is much easier to maintain a habit. But developing habits, that's very often the thing that costs energy. And that means

that normally in the daily life of our training as on, I don't have to spend too much time on less on culture and these kind of things, because I'm very well aware and spending quite a lot of time on also evaluating not necessarily only the things they say, but also the things they don't say. And communicate. And when I see that there are things that are

starting to worry me a little bit, I'm not afraid of taking up that topic, even though it might be unpleasant. But I think it's much better to ask the question, because they also know my intention. So even if it's an unpleasant question, but they know that my intention is good. Then I think it's and there's trust. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So so that means that in the

daily life, when we are doing the training and so on, it's we. We have a very open dialogue about strategy, about tactics and all these kind of things, of course, and know each other quite well. It was quite funny, a little bit leading into the competition or in Kona. We did a lot, last preparation weeks. And then, of course, they are having a little bit of

like, let's call it serious fun. Because they are feeling each other out a little bit on the in the training. And of course, they talk a little bit more like open mind a little bit about how they feel and so on. The last day, I know what, of course, Christian is thinking that, okay, this is my strength, this is how I'm going to leverage it. And

also the funny thing was that Gustav also told me that when I get out of energy lab, this is where I'm going to make my search. So I knew already, but of course, that last part of it, I can't say to Christian because Gustav, of course, of course, comes and tells it to me in confidence and the same way that Christian does. But that's fine. When

you have this small last thing and you say, okay, this is what I'm going to put together. That's fine to keep that small part of it. But keep being open, being transparent. And actually, you're also actually being willing to expose yourself. I think it's also very important because when we find our competitive advantages, it's very easy to grow into that this is my thing. But eventually

people will catch up. But if you are willing, actually to expose that competitive advantage and share it, maybe with your strongest rival, it also puts you, you in a place where you know that you're building a rival stronger, but it also puts yourself in an uncomfortable position also where you need to start to hunt also for new competitive advantages. And this way, we also drive not

only, let's say, the physiological part, but also the psychological part and build it, build it each other stronger also in training. Yeah. It's delicate though. Like it feels fragile. Right. If you get one of those pieces just a little bit wrong, the whole thing, I think it collapsed on top of itself. That's also where I think it is important to create robustness to, I think that

if that had been a worry for me, that it starts to become very fragile, then I would sit down and actually spend quite a lot more time talking about these kind of topics, culture and these kind of things, because I knew that now things are fragile and the chances for that suddenly something breaks and either require even more energy to bring it back. Again, and you

can't really focus on the details, or let's say those small marginal gains, you actually back just the basic building, trying to repair things. That's a situation that I think, or I know at least for myself, would be very hard to live with. So in those situations, when I start to feel things are fragile, those are the times where data and everything else really doesn't matter anything

for me anymore. The only thing that matters for me now is the relationship and bringing that robustness so that you have some room to play. In Kona, the way that the race played out, did that meet expectations? Did it defy expectations? Did it surprise you? And what are you taking away from that experience to go back to the lab and learn more? I think the biggest

mistake we did going into the competition is that we knew that there were outsiders. That were going to take risks. But we just, the late lousy, etc. Which was based on everybody's feed by Christian Gustav having trained together with him. That no. They could let him go. But there were others where there were more cautious about, and then they get to pay for it on the

run after. But in terms of performance, they were, Gustav was one minute of what we predicted would be the final time for them. And that was the swim was where we expected to be. The bike was where it expected to be. The run was a little bit more than a minute slower than what we would expect to be. So I would say that performance wise, what

we prepare for, it was where we expected to be. But we just miscalculated a little bit, let's say, or competitors. I actually don't spend very much time on competitor analysis and so on. I know the Christian and Gustav really have a better feeling and a better understanding of that than me. So I trust them much more to do that part. My goal is rather to just

make sure that we prepare how we think is possible to prepare for race with the given conditions that we have. We went from a sprint distance in Bergen, which is on the opposite side of the spectrum. We knew we had very little time to prepare going into Kona. And yeah. Making sure that part fits together is the most important for me. And then the rest is

something. Who could have predicted that Sam Leila would do what he did? That can't be part of how you're preparing for a race anyway. But with respect to Christian and his performance, obviously things didn't go the way that he would have liked them to have gone. What was that conversation with him like after the race? Actually, we really haven't had that because I normally like it.

I know that Christian is spending quite a lot of time evaluating his own performance also after the race. And you don't necessarily because one part is the data. The other part is also the other things that you can't collect with data, especially in a race where you can't use equally much instruments as you are doing in training. So the qualitative part of the analysis after a

race like this often takes a little bit of time. And it needs maybe a little bit time to mature. And as I said, no Christian also said earlier today, and that is that it's still something that they playing around or let's say, rewinding in his mind a little bit. What could he have done different? What didn't go according to plan? And of course, now with the

next days we are starting to discuss it a little bit, but it's not like throughout one conversation we will have the answer to it. It's something that we will we are started. We will start to get a picture of it. Then we get more the course picture. And then as we start to work, you still start to remind or play of the scenarios in your head.

And that will eventually come out to into the into the program. So leaving corner, heading back also now long distance trial plan is not our main focus anymore or not or focus at all. Now the challenge that we are really focusing on is the Olympics. So for me actually the only thing that I'm thinking of now is basically how do we how can we permute our

unfortunately I don't have it's very difficult to do very much with because we come from corner. They have to recover now for a couple and bring bring it back into training. Then they get the same George, half arm and well champs and then a week after you get Bermuda. The problem with going to Bermuda that raises that you have so much noise in the training with

both that you have been doing races that are very different from what you are going to do in Bermuda. You have a lot of travel and other things that that is happening that that in Bermuda you don't we can't say that get this is what we did. This is okay. This is how it turned out in Bermuda. If I would do that, I would probably end

up with a lot of false positives. No, it's a very unusual. It doesn't create a clean data set from which to extract any kind of truce. Yeah, exactly. And that means that it's actually from Bermuda into Abu Dhabi where we get I think it's three or four weeks where we really can start to do some work. And in Abu Dhabi then we would have a good

idea. This is what it looked like in training. This is what the data sets look like. This is the feedback I had from the athletes and discussions. And then this is the rest of the day. Now, Abu Dhabi then you get the bench mark against others. And this will be the point where we also go back into the labs and start to do more structured Olympic

target at work to eventually or hopefully be able to do something that nobody have done before. And that is to go from the Olympic to the arm and back to the Olympic. Nobody's done that. Right. Yeah. They're so different. And I want to get into how all of this unfolded and then your unique approach to the relationship between science, data and human performance. And I think

the best way to do that is just to do it chronologically. To recount your entrance into the Norwegian triathlon equation and kind of go from there. Because you've been learning. As you've been going and you did come in with this engineering background, but this beginner's mind without all the kind of calcified baggage around what you're supposed to do. And the way we've always done it. And

this is the way it works. And no, we can't try that kind of mindset. Yeah. I, as a long as I can remember. And both my grandparents, but also my parents, have said that they had a big hunger. Or thirst or curiosity to understand things since I was a kid to the point where my parents had just had to clean almost a house for everything that

could be. Tinkered with. Tinkered with. Yeah. Are you the guy who's like taking the TV apart and stuff? Yes. Okay. And when I first had done that and I looked into it and saw how things were. I was not so keen to put it back together again. Right. A lot of detractors lying around the house. So that was not the fun. But that was not so

fun. But, yeah, technology. It's also a little bit of a paradox. On one side, I really love nature. And one of the times where I actually are able to recharge the most is actually when I'm completely away from technology. When I'm out in nature, I'm not able to be reached. I'm places where there is no phone connection or other things like this. It takes a few

days. And this is when I really start to find my own piece. And this is one of the things that also I very often, I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to reach the most. And miss the most. But on the other side, also technology and how we can learn more about humanity, about what we do. Just advance or less, be able to advance

faster in what we do. There I think technology is really powerful. And the way I actually got into, I started some businesses that I built up and sold. And then in 2011, it was a, we had a family accident. I lost four family members in the past. And helicopter crashed. We were going, we were building a mountain diary farm. And which we was more for the

family. So I flew first off with parts of my family. And then helicopter turned back home. And it came, came back up with the rest of the family and it crashed. And there was nothing we could do. So, and there it is a remote area where there is no phone reception. So I had to run for one hour to get up on a mountain top. How

old were you? At that time, I think that was my 30th birthday. It was, my 31st birthday was going to be celebrated when we were up there at the mountain diary farm. So I remembered running up the mountain there. I got some time to think and I thought, okay, I really have to do something. Because I came from a more much more explosive background. Where I

really liked power training and I sailing was sailing. Yeah. And that's also wanting the people on to think too much about, but in a sailing or in very competitive environment, everything, there's nothing happening on both everything is five second first. Yeah, like super explosive and every second count. Because if you're losing one second throughout attack, before you are able to get up to speed again, that's

already quite a lot of meters. And for every attack you're making or every job you're making now and you're losing time, that's, you can't do that if you really want to be the best. So from there, of course, it went into endurance boards. I did a lot of experimentation. But again, I was with business. I found a very good mentor and that was, he was the

CEO of Pricewaterhouse Cooper's in Norway. And he took me under his wings and guided me in sports. When I decided I need to do something with my fitness, I just started to Google who really is the person to ask for. And there, I, because for your own fitness, you're on pursuit of being an athlete. Exactly. Yeah. To do something. Because I obviously needed a coach or

I thought I needed a coach to help me advance. And I found out there was a guy named Ojan Matson, Dr. Ojan Matson. And we had a common friend which put me in contact with him. We met. Both of us were doing kiting. And that became my journey, a very special journey because in, he, the way that he coached me or inspired me, was very much

not, he didn't tell me, okay, no, this is, you have to read this on page, this page or this is working exactly this way. Sometimes it could have got a little bit more direct in his guiding. But most of the time, I would say probably more than 90%, 95% of the time. He was much more in nurturing that I had to figure out, I had to

find out by by reading, encouraging and empowering you. Yeah. But ultimately allowing you to have your own experience. Yeah. And I, I, that became something that became such a big passion for me, because I really, I'm also extremely competitive in a way that I want to be the best in the things I do. So in the same way that I expect, of course, the best from

Christian and Gustav, independent of what kind of goal they are pursuing. I, I can't expect less from myself. I have to expect for myself to have the same pursuit for developing or being a really good coach, understanding how we can, how we can work on different things to, to excel performance. And that is a never ending pursuit because there are so many things about physiology that

we still don't know. I would say that it's probably more things we still don't know than what we do know. And that is very, that's actually for me, makes it very interesting to work on it because it then also becomes a research project. Each individual, it's not something that's. And also that there's so much growth to be had, right? I mean, this is a big thing

when you come into triathlon and you're like, yeah, you guys have been doing this, but like, you don't even really understand what this means. And there's so many other things we could be doing. Yeah. And that, that I think that I think when I also have done two, at least that I'm very willing to join in on the research projects to which makes it much more

fun. And I think fun is a very big, that's, that's, that's, that's super. Very important actually. But where it makes it interesting, you know exactly what you say, it is growth. And maybe growth is in the end, what it all is about. If you don't have growth anymore as an athlete or even as a coach, I think you start to. Flop. Yeah. Yeah. So you're exploring

your athlete side, you're learning about the science of human performance. How does this ultimately, you know, land you at the feet of. The fledgling Norwegian triathlon federation or, you know, program or whatever it was at the time. So it happened to be that I had never thought over that there was a national team in triathlon at that time. But Oyal Motzen, he was the coach from

the Olympic Federation for the Olympic or for the for the Norwegian triathlon federation and for for Arild. And it was in 2014 and 2015 he then he started to bring me a little bit more. So I did some training sessions with them. But eventually he said that you should really come in and be a part of the Olympic program in triathlon and start to use now

because he had privately tutored me in physiology. And of course with my background from technology and I could start to merge. A lot of the studies we do today, there are you distinguish between in vivo and in vitro. And I think that's what I'm saying. And the problem with in vitro is that you is you can study things and you can control things and you can

get our result. But you're not able to bring it back into human performance context. With the technology that we have available today, we are getting closer and closer to that more of the research we are doing can happen in vivo or in in the situation with the athletes. And I think this is something that he as a physiologist also thought was quite inspiring and interesting to

see how quickly I was able to advance in the understanding of how performance come to back. And I think that's the way I was able to come together. And where he said that all of can you help me with some of the analysis when he was doing that with the team. And as we did this, I think he also found quite a lot of inspiration in

this. And that was eventually where I was sitting down with Arald and Ojan and talking. And they said, okay, now this was in 2015 leading into 2016. I started to shadow Arald and Christian just to see in a lot of different areas from everything from the bike to basically metabolism. And a lot of other things. What did the training look like? What did the performance look

like? More or less trying to understand where the gaps were. And then as Rio was concluded and we started up again a few months later, starting to make a way towards Tokyo. This is when I was asked to come into the program and take over the scientific part of it and I became part of the coach team. So in Rio, you're essentially observing, right? And you're

kind of gathering information and data. And from what I understand, you kind of come to this conclusion looking at triathlon, like sort of canvassing the landscape, that despite extreme advances in the bicycles, like we've seen bikes come a long way, beyond that and some kind of aerodynamic stuff. And maybe carbon played a choose where we were going to be. What have you? There really wasn't that

much advancement in the sport. I mean, I think the marathons that Dave Scott and Mark Allen were running way back in the day until very recently, we're still kind of the gold standard and people were struggling to eclipse those times. Now the record book has been rewritten, but back in 2016, this was sort of the case, right? And you have this realization, like, oh, there's so

much more we could be doing because technology has advanced. So much. And data science and these data sets could actually create models for much more efficient training to extract a higher level of performance from the athlete who's willing to kind of go all in on this with me. Yeah. The really nice thing I, I, all of the things that I really value with Christian and Gustav

is actually a lot of conversations we have because they also have a lot of ideas and perspectives on on the sport and performance. And that is how I also see that we are working together as a team is not like I'm like a leader or coach dictating what they should do, but is rather we just have different tasks. And for example, one thing that me and

Christian was sitting down discussing, this was when was this, this was, I think it was early this year, or was it leading into customer, I don't remember exactly. But then when we started to break down, okay, what do we think is possible to do in the swim in the bike and then in the run? One of the things that we, when we started to analyze performances

is quite interesting to see that if you take spin performance or Olympic spin distance and you compare them, you'll see that you can basically take the swim and you can multiply it by two point, let's say, for the, for the fun of it, we just say 2.1. A low, let's say 2.0 something. So it's a little bit more than done a factor factor two on the

swim is the same on the bike and the same on the run. So the times are almost on all these different disciplines almost a double that's that's it. If you go from Olympic distance and you go to half Ironman distance, you're almost also seeing exactly the same. The time that you're using on the swim, if you go from 1500 meter to 99 meter is almost liner.

The same on the bike is almost liner. And also the same thing if you go on the run is almost liner. If you not go from half Ironman, it go to full distance Ironman is actually the same for the swim. And for the bike, but not the run. And then the question becomes why is there such a big difference on the run part, but not on

the bike part, not on the swimming part. And one of the ways that we started to view this a little bit is that if you look at the training that you're doing throughout the day, throughout the weekend, so on swimming 750 meters, you do every training. So you never have a swim session as a short session is less than probably 2500 meters or so. And even

I would say that very seldom less than 3000 meters most of the time more than 40,000 meters even. So that means that most of the swimming sessions you have throughout the week, you are actually covering also Ironman distance in your swimming, just broken up into intervals lower intensity high, sometimes high intensity and so on. But you cover more or less the volume there. The same also

goes for the bike for all distances, maybe except for for Ironman distance. In Ironman distance, of course, you have a working time that is more than four hours, of course 180 kilometers. But you do several times a month, maybe rides that are closer to four hours, and sometimes maybe even a little bit more than four hours on the bike. Of course, not the same intensity, but

you still get the volume in there. Running, is the place where you, yes, in your running, you always cover a sprint distance of five kilometers in on a run. All-in-peer distance, 10 kilometers around most of the session you will cover, even that if you count your warm up your main set and your cool down, when you come to the half Ironman distance, this is where you,

okay, you still cover that distance or close to the distance maybe once a week or at least a couple of times a month, but the Ironman distance you don't. And then when you, when we start to understand this, then the question becomes why, what can we do about this? Right. So basically, you're saying that the Olympic distance triathlete is approximating Ironman training for the most part

in a way that has been underappreciated. Right? There are more endurance athletes than we've sort of respected them to be and are closer along that path towards being an Ironman athlete than one might originally have surmised. So that's the original kind of idea. Except for the run part, right? And translating the training into taking that athlete from the shorter distance to the longer distance. The run

a very basic, a simple approach to a lot of things. If you want to race in corner, going to Antarctic and doing a preparation, that will probably not be a very good idea. If you prepare probably quite well to race in Antarctic, but not in corners. So you need to be in the place where you want to prepare both from understanding the course, but also course

getting used to the heat that is there. The same thing also goes with racing. I don't think that, I think that the reason why we could come into Ironman racing and really just make a huge hit there and being very dominant is because we saw that there was a big room of improvement. Or let's say that in Olympic racing, we are closer to what I call

peak human performance. While in Ironman racing, we are further away from it. It can have to do with the competitiveness, the resources that are spent on it to understand in the physiology and all these kinds of things being involved there. But that's why I think that, and I think that for a period of time now, because now every now and then, you start to get a

new picture of, okay, what can we do smarter in our training? And these are the times you typically make, you jump up one step in the staircase. But as people are starting to really understand this and able to extract the margins from it, that's also where you're starting to see that the sports, let's say those distances also become more part again. So now it's more that,

okay, we are in a place where we're exploiting a gap, which has not been covered in the longer distances. But as the long distance, the people that really just focus on long distances, they were able to bridge up and they will get a competitive advantage again. Because training as an Olympic athlete, prepare for Olympic distance. Training for an Ironman do require a different specialization. And the

reason for that is that two fundamental laws I really often like to come back to when things become a little bit too complicated. For example, physiology is easy to, if you ask somebody about view to max, for example, you get so many different answers. What's the single best workout to train your view to my? Some will say long slow distance, some will say high intensity. Some

will say, there's a micro intervals, that there are so many different answers to this. And cardiologists will have a say that, okay, the heart is the most important thing. You get for other people say, no, it's the muscles, the mitochondria, which is the most important thing. The fact is that when you just look at a simple graph and you plot the O2 on the Y axis

and you plot power on the X axis, you'll see that if you plot five minute power, increasing five minute power on the X axis, and you plot the O2 on the Y axis, you'll see there is a perfect correlation between the two. So obviously, increasing your five minute power will obviously also increase your view to max. If you don't have a high five minute power, you

can't expect to have a high view to max. Now the question becomes is that I think that too often in training, we end up diving into physiology and trying to understand it from a physiological perspective instead of a requirement perspective. What is really the demand or requirement that we need to adapt to? And that's also why I think that you will, if you go out and

of course, now I'm just showing out some numbers here, I really don't have evidence for this, but it's more like a feeling based on all the people. That I've been talking to and that is that you'll most often find probably more excellent coaches that don't have a physiology degree than excellent coaches that has a physiology degree. And the reason for that, I think is because the

coach that doesn't have a physiology degree, he needs to understand performance from a practical perspective. What is really the demand here? How can I really work on that demand? While a physiology is very often because maybe they've been taught in a book that the heart is the main limiter and they start to obsess too much about an isolated part in the body rather seeing the holistic

thing about it. And that's why I also have two fundamental laws that I always end up coming back to. And one is the first law of thermodynamics is that it's you can't create energy, you can't destroy energy, you can only convert it from one form to another form. And that means in the body, it means turning calories into velocity. Right. And the order is basically being

a stationary action principle, meaning that the law of least action and that is basically that energy will always, the nature will always try to solve a task with the least possible energy required. So if you're going to run 10k and you start to become better and better and better at it, the body will always start to try to figure out how can it do this with

the least possible energy expanded. And that's also where the specificity also comes in. Because if you train for a Olympic distance trial, it has a completely different demand with bigger surges, it requires higher power output in these kind of things. While an arm and distance don't have that kind of thing, you're not going to have, you don't need a huge five minute power in an arm.

If you're going to put in huge five minute power, you're probably on one side, not going to have a very ideal metabolic profile. And secondly, it's going to cost you too much energy if you decide to put in a search like that. So we also know that, for example, that the heart is grossly inefficient in, I think, that statistically for average population, the heart has an

efficiency of 10%. And like Gustav said, is that his view to max, he knows now, because we have done quite a lot of research. And that is that his view to max for this arm and have come down. And the reason for that is because you don't, since you don't need a big view to max, you don't need equally big heart. Right. And we also know

that for nature, it's easier to, let's say, solve something with higher frequency, then higher force, higher force costs more. And it puts bigger strain on what you need to dimension from a pure physics perspective. But that back to the stationary action principle, the other fundamental law. And that is that the nature will always try to solve things as cheap as possible. So if you're going to

be good on the Iron Man where the power put is much lower than it is for, for Olympic distance, that is going to need an adaptation. And a part of that adaptation. And being able to extract more and more and more from your capabilities will also result in reduction in stroke. Because you don't have the energy. If you spend too much energy, maintaining a big view

to max a big heart and these kind of things, you're obviously focused on training something that is not necessarily like a part of your own arm. The discipline that you're trying to. Exactly. Excel at. No, that makes perfect sense. There's always going to be compromises. And when you're going to, you know, toggle that lever to, you know, level up in a longer distance race, it's going

to, you know, sacrifice that high end power that you don't necessarily need. What you need is efficiency. And you need the breadth of that aerobic capacity to last for that number of hours without, you know, tapping out your glycogen stores and all the rest. The sort of traditional approach, the conventional wisdom around preparing for an endurance event has always been, or historically has been, you go

get lactate tested and you do that traditional progressive test where, you know, watts are increased and out of specific interval and you prick with lactate and you take perceived effort and heart rate, et cetera. And from that, you extract your training zones and then maybe you revisit two or three months later and you set the parameters of your training protocol in accordance with those zones and

in conjunction with like some kind of periodization situation, right. You enter the equation, you look at this and you say, okay, I'll find in well. But, you know, is this really the best way to do this? Like where can we improve upon this? So walk me through like how you kind of looked at the particular protocol or perhaps more broadly, how we think about intensity regulation

in training and also the difference between, you know, what you tell an athlete to do and what they actually do. So I think, of course, what we have seen after the Olympics and Christian and Gustav and have been featured a lot of different places. And one of the things that, on the one side, looks of course a little bit like that. So exotic, but also get

a lot of attention because it's, you know, suddenly they have blood running down their shirts and these kind of things dripping from the air and we like to joke about it. It's all about blood tear and sweat. But these guys are pin cushions. You're pricking them all the time. They got patches all over their body. There's data flowing out of their eyeballs and you're taking fecal

samples and pouring, you know, trackers down their throats and isotope water like it's insane. Yeah. I think that's I think maybe one of the first and important thing to cover is of course that I think that if you, my advice would normally be that if you really don't are going to spend the time investing in understanding the strengths and weaknesses of lactate, what effects the lack

that measurements, what both from a contamination perspective, but also from purely that understanding that when we are measuring, like we are measuring our concentration, we don't we don't measure volume. And that's that's actually that's actually a very interesting topic that we probably could cover some time, but that sounds like a four hour lecture that my eyes would glaze over. I don't even know, you know, what

you just said exactly, but no, but I mean, but that is that when you measure, it lacked it in the blood. You measure a concentration. It just tells you that okay, from the sample we made here, this is the concentration of lactate in the animals, yeah, of millimoles, yeah, and in of of lactate in that volume of blood that you're measuring. The problem is that you

don't know how much do you have it? So that's very simple. Since you're measuring in the blood, if you have a reduction in in plasma volume, for example, which easily happens as a function of dehydration, change of climate, going to altitude, that's already going to change the concentration. Yeah, even though you let's say that you you aim to find your maximum lactate steady state, which is

like a scientific term for or let's say maybe the only maybe the only term that maybe science is able to agree over as a as a threshold value is the maximum lactate. If you look up anaerobic threshold and you look for different definition, you probably find 30, 40, 50 different definitions of this. And if you go even into the protocols for how this you find even

further ways to do this and you start to understand, of course, the weakness and strength of it. Maximum like the steady state, there's a constrict where you're just looking at what is the highest sustainable workout you can do or intensity you can do while the lactate still remains stable. Right. And I have a question about that that's always confused me about this because I know that

that's sort of established wisdom, but what it doesn't account for to my mind and hopefully you can clear this up, is the difference between the athlete who can maintain that steady state for, I don't know, two hours, three hours, four hours, and the athlete who can maintain that steady state for 12 hours or nine hours. Those are two entirely different individuals who might have that same

data set. That that's going to match up. It doesn't account for that difference. And obviously when you're taking an athlete from Olympic distance to Ironman distance, that's the determining factor. I think you pinpointed something that a lot of people are forgetting. And that is when you go into the lab and you do a protocol. Or when you look at a power number of you to max

number. And so on is that you're actually looking at just power, not capacity view to max is not capacity is a power number. It's just the equivalent of let's say that if you said it, okay, I can go, I'm riding now at 300 watts. It's like you say, how long can you do that? Because that's for some. You do that for four days. Yes. Or can

you do that for another minute? Yeah. And that you could also have measured that just by view to say that I'm riding now to view to which is this. Because you can have, for example, just to give a very simple example. And that is that you can take two athletes. There has 80 milliliters per minute per kilogram in oxygen uptake. One can hold that for three

minutes. Another one can hold that for six minutes. Obviously there is a huge difference there. Right. And it's you can't explain it by view to max. And that is capacity. The problem with capacity that is extremely intrusive invasive to measure capacity. And the easiest way to do it is that you just need to go out and you need to do you have to take a let's

say you go. No, also with biopsy and this is also one of the places where unfortunately we see that more and more that we can't rely on many of the studies that have done or been done on muscle biopsies. There was a new study just released now where they had been looking at muscle biopsy in general. And they actually had done muscle biopsies, I think 12

spots on just the thigh. And they saw that the distribution of muscle osc cells or muscle fibers are very different across those locations. Right. So suddenly, what we depend on where the biopsy is being done. And what are they looking for? Are they looking for mitochondrial density or what is the depends. It depends very much on what you are looking for. Because you can take cell

samples and look at, for example, mitochondrial respiration. You can look at fiber type distribution. How much are white red cells in the samples? For example, the distribution between them. But again, the problem with also muscle biopsy is that there's a concentration measurement. And not the volumetric meaning basically that you can have two athletes where it seems like, for example, one athlete, let's say you take one

athlete, two sprinter athletes or two athletes that that where you look at the distribution of muscle fibers and one would have, let's say, you said, or you have 70% type two fibers and 30% type one fibers. But then you find another one as well. You take use and bolt and you would say that, okay, problem high, but let's use the same numbers. So 70% type two

fibers and 30% type one fibers. But if you just give a visual, if you just looked at them visually, one would have like huge thighs. Another one would have a small one. So you could have the same amount, the distribution between type one and type two would be the same. But just that the other guy has so much more fibers in total that you do understand

immediately. Then obviously a biopsy doesn't tell you that story. Exactly. And the same thing back to power than power, asking exactly about maximizing the steady state. You would probably not be able to hold for many hours, but what you would be, but what you would see, there is a huge range there as well. Some people will be able to hold a maximum like the steady state

maybe for 30 minutes before they start fatigue. Others can hold it for 70, 80, maybe 90 minutes before they fatigue. And we really don't know exactly why. This is still something that we are studying. Some people are saying that it's it's in it has to do with the neurons that are starting to fatigue. Others are saying that no, it's it's due to glycogen available, it's just

you running out of glycogen. And then the problem is also that you can't necessarily because there's also where we say that well, you can store approximately 500, 600 grams of carbs in your body or glycogen in your body. But that doesn't necessarily tell you that you can tap into all those 500, 600 grams of carbs. Maybe some people will only be able to tap into 300

of those before the body will start to signal and say that okay, something really bad is starting to happen here now. So we are going to shut you down. And you're not able to override it. While other athletes as you train for this, you learn to tap more and more into those resources. We really don't know exactly what is. And that's why if you try to

explain things only from a physiological perspective and a training that you're building up becomes very physiological oriented, you might actually lose out on some more very practical approaches. Like just saying, okay, but okay, if we don't understand physiology, 100%, there are still black holes. So we have to go through the gaps to be filled. How can we then understand it from a more practical perspective? Well,

go out, talk this speed, go for that long, and we see basically where you bump or you go by power, go out, you ride that power until you see that you maybe not bump, but I say that you are not able to to maintain that power anymore. And you start to get a very good picture of also capacity because capacity is more how much you can

do at a certain intensity over time, not only power number. Because that's also the problem with when you say when you try to say something about FTP critical power, maximum electricity state, and so on, is that you're just telling somebody that, okay, my maximum electricity state is, or my FTP, whatever term you want to use, my anaerobic threshold, is 300 watts. But again, if you're two

riders with the same FTP, one might be quite superior over the other ones, because basically if you had now looked at, okay, how long can you ride this? Mm-hmm. One guy can ride this for 60 minutes or another one, 30 minutes. The guy that can ride this for 60 minutes, obviously, if he's a competition lasting for 30 minutes, he will be able to tap into something

that the guy that only were able to ride for it for 30 minutes, would not able to tap into. So that's why I think that practical coaches that has often are more practical, or let's say a physics perspective that I like to have myself to the approach, and just saying, okay, if we think of that there's an input, there's an output, and in between there is

physiology. This gray box that we have a lot of understanding inside, but there's also a lot of things we don't understand. But you just say, okay, what this is the input, this is the output, and you measure it, try to measure things in a very practical way, is very often easier to get much more specific answers, and understand demand, understand limitations. And then you rather use

this gray box of physiology to try to understand how can we do things smarter. But that's where the evolution is. Yeah. Right, right, right. So to kind of telescope out a little bit, in the broadest sense of the word, how do you think about intensity allocation for the endurance athlete? How much of this, you know, you're going to get irritated at me. But like if we're

just going to use zone phraseology, how much is zone one, how much is zone two, how much is threshold interval tempo work? How do you think about that? Like broadly, generally, not with respect to a specific athlete. Again, I think I have a much more like demand approach to it, necessarily zone approach it. And I think like Gustav and Christian also said is that in the

training leading into the competition, we have a plan for this is what we think we need to do, or this is a good plan. But as we train, we see that necessarily that one athlete doesn't respond or Christian or Gustav doesn't respond exactly as we plan. And then with this, this is where we need to make adjustments. I think where to go with this, because it's

a very complicated, it's not easy to answer this, because I'm much more demand driven. And I, instruments for me is a way of doing accounting towards the goal. Instead of just said, okay, this is a plan. We want to win this competition. So we make a plan for this. I get it. I get it. I guess I, where my head is coming from is thinking about,

like there's been a lot of press about like how to keep Chogi, you know, Ron is fast as he did recently. And Killian, Jordan, is a publishing his training diary. So you could see exactly, you know, what he's done over the last year. And, and extracting general principles from that, it paints this picture of how important, like very low intensity work is, like how much is

actually being done in zone one, you know, would blow people's minds and defies that argument that that's just junk miles, right? And also opens up the door to a conversation around an athlete's perception of intensity and work. Workouts versus what they're actually doing. So if you take Christian, for example, I know that he has this, you know, immense capacity to dig very deep. He, you know,

knows how to really probe that anaerobic engine that he has. And you realized early on in working with him, that on the easy days, he was going much harder than he was meant to and not even realizing it because he has, you know, that capacity to, you know, be in what most people would feel. To be like the red zone. Is that fair? Is that is

that an accurate? Okay, that's, that, I think that's a very good way to put it because also again, back to specificity again, you have a target in the training. And this is your number one priority. So if you're going to raise Kona at average power of 300 watts for four hours and 10 minutes. And that's what's going to bridge you also or set you up for

a really good run. That means that that kind of work training four hours and 10 minutes or sometimes a little bit longer low intensity, a little bit short on a little bit higher intensity, but in general around 300 watts and four, four hours and 10 minutes, that is your number one goal to improve in your training. And when you want to improve this in training, again,

I'm a big believer of specificity under the body is extremely smart and and adapts to, to, to, to the things that we prepare for. But that means also that if you now have workouts around there, on the one side, we know that athletes that trains mobile, in, for example, if you strive or publish a study, I think, or an article in 2011, 12, I don't, I

don't remember when, but basically where they took, they took all marathoners that had run a specific marathon. And they basically published the data behind those that had been running a sub 230 between 230, and so on. And also across genders. And one of the things that you see there is maybe the, the single best predict of performance in that context was volume. You just sort of

the faster people running the more volume they had put in. The problem with volume is that when you put in a lot of volume and you say, okay, well, maybe if you just put in even more volume, then it must be even better. If you now don't take into account that doing that volume also has a demand, basically again, first or thermodynamics, that, that speed that

power that you're doing over those hours that has a demand. So it has to come from calories. You also need to start to feed accordingly to be able to uphold this. Otherwise, you're going to run yourself into the ground at some point. And that means that, how, how the intensity has to be dictated is that you again have to think about consequences. Okay, so if this

is what I really want to be good at. If I'm writing, if I'm, when you have a low intensity session or less an easy session, or you're just writing, you have to evaluate, okay, how does this session now? Will that impact that key session that I have tomorrow? This is also just just something they can add is that a lot of people talk about quality sessions.

For me, everything should be a quality session. What is a low intensity, medium intensity or high intensity? Because we, we, we, we, we must separate quality from intensity because intensity just tells you where you are on the scale. Quality is about how do you execute that specific session. And if you're going to execute that low intensity, just a junk mass, that's going to be a low

quality. But it can also make it high quality. If you have a clear purpose with it and you know why you put it in there. But it means also that if you have now you know that have a key session tomorrow, day after, and you are doing our easy ride today, but you're starting to feel quite fatigued because you're writing a little bit higher part. Because

you can, you just feel I'm, I feel good today. This is really nice. I have good speed. There's a Strava segment, whatever that is there. And you, you, you, you get a little bit too hard on the, on the pedals or on the, on the run, swim, whatever. On that session, that might actually hamper or limit development that you're going to have on the key session

in one or two days. And this is why I, I think is much more important to, to have those key sessions and let the other sessions learn from the other session and how they basically bridge into increased performance on that key session. Because the reason why you have also all the other sessions around there is because you believe that having that low intensity sessions, those high

intensity sessions will eventually make you also better on that key session. Right. And if you're now starting to use those low intensity sessions and those high intensity sessions are something where you, you're going to do personal best on the low intensity sessions. You're going to do personal best on the high intensity sessions. You're real, you, you actually send yourself a familiar and not being able to

let's say personal best on that key session that you're aiming for. And this, this is unfortunately a place where you don't have the answer up, up front. You actually have to go back and reflect over what did I do? How did I execute this? And then gradually learn. And as you learn, you become a smarter athlete, you become a better coach, understanding how all these things

comes to better. But of course, at some point also you want to see how can we push this one? One more step. Yeah. Yeah. It's a, it's a different definition of discipline. We tend to think of discipline as the wherewithal to like do the hard thing. You know, when, when it's demanded upon us, but the true discipline is being able to hold back and always bringing

the appropriate amount of intentionality to everything that we're doing, right? Whether it's to go hard or to, you know, check yourself. Like because there's that Strava, you know, segment coming up and you could be a workout hero and a race day zero if you're not careful. Like I feel like Strava just fucks with people's heads and probably derails more training programs than anything that's ever been

created by human kind. And back to that also to lactate for me, lactate is, is, is, is actually the third layer for me. The first layer is velocity. In the end, power doesn't matter. Power really doesn't matter either because Indian you're going to race in corner. And if you're producing 500 watts for four hours and 10 minutes, but you are racing at an average speed of

35 minutes, 35 kilometer power that there obviously is something wrong. Yes, super nice power numbers and all these kind of things. But in the end, it's not power. You can make it win. It's the velocity that's going to make it win. So that means that for me, the first layer is always velocity. Understanding what, what the speeds are, what are the time you're going to give

because the distance is absolute. And the only thing that you can make then do or that you can do then to bridge down the, I'll say the time that you're going to take you to race the distance is that you need to be able to increase the velocity. Power is the second layer where you can start to understand now, for example, by a mechanical where you

can optimize, for example, by a mechanical because you can still produce a lot of power. But if you are moving more sideways than forward, obviously there's something really poor with your, your, your position on the bike isn't translating into velocity. Like you're just, it's just watts for watts sake. Exactly. And the same thing that that's also where the third layer comes in because now when you're

starting to use a lactate in these kind of things that allows you also to understand necessarily how efficient they are. You're producing that power because we also have to remember that. With all the technology that we have available today, it's still outputted as normally as a one hurts metric or let's say like a one second output. But when you pedal around, for example, in a circle,

obviously your power is not going to be the same exactly the same power all the way around that circle is going to change throughout that circle, for example, which we call intracellular variations. And the same thing is in swimming also. When you're swimming, for example, forward, you might be very powerful and you are able to accelerate yourself up to very high instantaneous speed. But because you

produce a lot of drag, you also de-exerate very heavily, which is not very efficient. You are wasting a lot of energy. And being able to, to, to work and understand is how can I actually expand the least possible energy moving at the same speed forward is a huge benefit. And where lactate comes in is that now you basically move yourself to the third layer and that

is understanding more the metabolism part in the body. How do you actually, where does the energy come from? And with all these tools instead of that you have like a starting point, saying, okay, we're going to win in Kona and you just make a plan and then you shop in Kona and you look at, okay, how did this go? All these tools allow us basically to

do, let's say, a form of accounting as we move and understand before race day, how things are starting to change, how do we adapt, how do we respond to the different stimulus? How does it allow us to basically make corrections before the big day? And that's obviously what we want to do because one plan, a plan is a plan, but it's also nothing more than a

plan. So when you're pricking these guys with needles for lactate ratings, like, you know, several times a day during the course of, you know, a couple workouts, what are you looking for? Like what is the data that is, you know, instructive in how you're gauging the training and approach? So one of the very complicated things with lactate is that it's influenced by a lot of different

factors. We touched upon plasma or, let's say, also hydration. So how much blood do you have in your body? Because the muscles is where basically the lactate is produced and is then released out into the blood stream. And if you now, for example, have a smaller, less blood volume, that means that the muscles will still continue to produce the same amount of lactate generally speaking. But

it also means that if you have a lower blood volume, that means that for the same intensity now, you'll get a higher lactate concentration in the blood. If you drink a lot, your well-heritrade, you're going to maybe heatachemidization, the opposite is going to happen now. And if you now just look at the raw numbers there and you just compare them from, let's say, from week to

week or something like this, you will start to make what I would call like false, false positive adjustments in the program. So lactate is extremely complicated because you need to understand it in the bigger picture. And I guess this is also what Gustav also tried to pinpoint a little bit. And also what we do know is that lactate actually is a fuel. It's a super fuel

for the body that the body actually uses. It's, yeah, the body actually prefers to burn lactate if we can do. But also we know that metabolism to burn anything, you need oxygen. So your view to max will also affect your lactate concentration. And typically as you specialize, for example, for an iron man distance, what will happen is that your view to max will naturally come down.

To use a very simple example. If you get diarrhea or you are getting sick or something like this, you lose completely appetite. And then you start to eat again after one week. You feel feel in your stomach very, very early on. The stomach basic is very plastic. It basically pulls together. But as you start to eat more, you're getting your appetite back and so on. Your

stomach starts to stretch again. Same thing is probably also what is happening with the heart, at least what we have measured indirectly. It's because it caused a lot of energy to have a big stroke volume. The stroke volume is start to come probably down as you're starting to specialize for an iron man much faster than we have thought ever before. We don't know yet, but this

is the research we are working on. So now when your view to max comes down, that will also now suddenly start to affect how your body is using the different substrate or how they say how the different substrates is represented in the blood as lactate. And this makes it very complicated. And you have to use us quite a lot of common sense, but also from previous

understanding to understand, okay, are we where we want to be or I mean not where we want to be. What is really affecting it, for example, if it's hot outside, for example, much hotter than it other days, the problem is one of the critical functions for the body then is to prioritize cooling. So more of the blood in the body will redirect, redirect it from the

core towards out the skin to transport heat from the core towards the skin. And then basically so you can basically get rid of the transfer the heat to the surroundings. But also when this is happening, that means also there is less blood going into the muscles and less blood into the muscles means less oxygen into the muscles, less oxygen into the muscles. It means basically that

now if you're going to do the same, continue at the same velocity, the body needs to start to draw more of the local energy stores the other glycoach and carbohydrates, which again will turn out in a higher lactic concentration. So there are so many things that basically affects lactic concentration in your blood that if you're in a very stable environment and often also the problem with

research is that we are trying it so the more we do in the field, also the more you understand that even when you go into laboratory and you do this kind of testing, that a lot of the testing is not in vivo. It's actually a form of in vitro because it's so far out of context that yes, you have to know exactly what we will continue

to use lab, lab testing a lot. But you really have to understand what you what you are, what kind of information you are getting in the lab and how you can't or can't transfer that knowledge to the field again. Right. So on a practical level, for example, like testing Christian or Gussie, or the first of out in the field, what kind of principles did you extract

from like, okay, you're in Kona and you're getting ready for the race and you're out there and they're getting pricked and oh, it's hot out and like, how does that inform tweaks in the training? Like, oh, we saw something interesting here with the lactate that we didn't know beforehand and now we're going to do this instead of that. So to give a practical example, typically the

closer we get to the race, the more requirement or demand oriented we become because at that time, adapting or ensuring maximum adaptation to what you're going to do is the most important thing. Physiology more has to just come along. But of course, you hopefully you have set up your physiology to be able to come along the closer you get into the race. So when now when

we are out in the field and we are doing the testing and let's say I do the lactate testing on the boys, of course, now I know the context because we have the core sensors on the body, we have the moxies sensors on as well, which where we can see what is the core temperature, how much is it changing? Is it changing more than yesterday, for

example? And if I see, for example, now the core temperature is coming up higher than, for example, yesterday, that would then I would also at the same power output. I would normally also expect that a that the lactate is starting to come up a little bit higher, but also it might start become unstable too. So it's it it and I would never also do a decision

only based on lactate. It would be based on the other information that I have available. Right. It's only that information is only as valuable as how it relates to core body temperature and 10 other data points. Right. Exactly. Yeah. It's just where it gets. We all want to be reductive about this. But like the more the more you know, the more complicated it is, which puts

you in a compromising situation of trying to explain this to the way people like it's it's very difficult. The core body temperature piece, though, is so interesting. I feel like this is a whole new frontier that is only just beginning to be understood. I had a guy on the podcast many years ago, his professor of biology at Stanford, Craig Heller, who done a lot of studies

on this at Stanford and had developed like a cooling glove and realized like he could get 40% boost in performance off like a pull up test from his students when he could make a call. So he's going to be able to maintain a cooler core body temperature and in a place like Kona or any endurance event where the body naturally overheats. You tip over into a

zone from which you cannot return and it's disastrous. Right. So to the extent that you can understand core body tap and figure out a way to, you know, as Gustav and Christian were putting it earlier, tolerate, you know, an increase in core body temperature or maintain a lower core body temperature. So I think that's a massive key to gigantic performance gains, I would think. And in

terms of energy expenditure from your perspective, it's a function of looking at, okay, you know, you were saying earlier, like, you know, that the law of like, you know, no energy is wasted, like energy and energy out. Well, that energy in, is that going towards velocity or is that going towards, you know, cooling your body temperature and figuring out how to, you know, kind of get

that equation of, you know, the best that it can pop up. Possibly, it's actually one of the things that really triggered me when it came to heat and are actually green text sensor, the core sensor, the white thing that they're wearing on the belts is that we normally say that the body, or if you look at your computer bike computer, you'll see the normally that when

you do a certain amount of work, you get out of a calorie amount and you think, okay, how can this know this? And that is of course that we know that there's a very tight correlation between power and calamity. And that's because some of the tests that have been done in the past says that there is a rather fixed ratio between mechanical power and thermal power.

And thermal power is what we couldn't measure in the past. So when you just do this work now, they normally we said that the body is 25% efficient in reality. It's less than 20%. It depends a little bit on what kind of modality, what kind of sport you are doing. But normally you would say 20, 21% efficiency, that is where it is. But this boils down

to how you measure it also. It does why maybe we have seen higher numbers also in the past, because it depends a little bit on how we measure. And traditionally, how this was measured in the past. And also today is that you use indirect calamity. You're using a mask or to measure your oxygen uptake. Again, what we have done and where this has been important for

us is to advance into the field and we are working with a Canadian company to, be able to get rid of all types of wires and so on. So that is really one's to use it. Field is comfortable to use it. And at the same time, we can feed that data straight into our bi-computer source or our sports watches. So that we can start to look

at, for example, mechanical power and the calamity. Because in between the difference between those two, or less in the missing piece, if you calculate just calimetric power into mechanical power, like say pure power, you'll see that there's a huge component missing. And that will you see that's approximately 80%. So then where does this 80% go? Most of it heat. The problem with that obviously is that

when you now your muscles are doing work on the bike, you're taking calories and calories will ultimately be the ceiling to your performance. You can't get more energy than what you have trained your body to deliver at any given time. So in the same way as in Formula One, for example, they're really trying to improve the efficiency of the cars. And today they're talking about maybe

more than 50% efficiency of the combustion engines. It's not because the combustion engine is not working. The combustion engine in itself is capable of or how's it turning fuel 50% of that into pure mechanical power. It's because they're actually recycling the heat that the engine is. So the efficiency of the engine is probably around 20, 25% as well as it's, but the rest of it is

actually just taking the heat that the engine is producing and they are able to recycle also a big part of that back into mechanical power. And of course in the body, what happens is that when you're exercising and we know that now certainly for every car, you have a calorie that you are burning, 20% of that goes into velocity or power and 80% of that goes

into heat. So where does the heat go? Obviously now we have a huge thermal capacity so we can store a lot of that heat, but that will at some point become a problem because we will start over heat and the body will try to get rid of as much as possible of the heat. But then one of the ways to do this is exactly that the

body starts to prioritize bringing blood instead into the muscles out towards the skin and get rid of it. This is of course where we need to understand how does this work and where we had a very experimental approach to it and we did everything from rectal probes to rectal pills to basically, okay, which is not very invasive because the at least it becomes used to it

that it's okay, just do it. But on the other side, it's a very expensive method to approach or to use. And here now what, I knew that there was a lot of patches on the market that of course said, yeah, we can measure the core temperature or this kind of thing, but they do the same way as if you have a, if your kid is sick

or something like this and you take the, you scan the front a little bit the, the thermometers, it will give you a core temperature or a temperature of your body. But the thing is that it doesn't measure it. It just takes the skin temperature. It's not a true accurate measurement. No, it just takes your skin temperature and it applies a constant. What really intrigued me with

the sensor that core produced was that, or green tech produced was that it's basically there are two sensors in there. And that is the one that the measures the skin temperature, but it's also, it's a thermal power meter in it. So if you had made this one in metal and you put your cooking stove to two kilowatts and you put it on the end, this won't

be able to measure that, okay, there's two kilowatts output now. That's crazy. And now suddenly we can have this on the body and that's why there are pictures out of course with Christian. So how much energy your body's producing and, directly, the temperature piece. Yes, exactly. Wow. So this is now, let's say, blue tooth to the garment. Yeah. No, actually, A&T plus, but also blue tooth,

yeah, straight into the garments. You can have it there. So you actually have both no mechanical power and thermal power. Looking at it. That's freaking crazy. So what we also then want to optimize is basically, how can we take those calories, those, those limited calories that we actually can turn into work per minute, per second, per minute per hour. How can we optimize that because again,

calories are the limit, but how can we increase the ratio between the summer part and the mechanical part? From an evolutionary perspective, that ratio sounds crazy. Yeah. That only 20% goes into actual, you know, what would you call it? Like energy output 80% to heat management. It doesn't seem right. Like how did, how did, how did human survive? Yeah. Yeah. So inefficient. Yeah. But probably that's

that was also one of the keys when you didn't have like very, I'm just speculating because this is, of course, there's a topic I didn't research very much, but because it doesn't affect the performance of the boys, too much or knowing this, but I want to maybe speculate that we didn't have proper clothing or these kind of things. And then the body needed to be able

to keep yourself warm. So a lot of the calories had to go into heating your body, making sure that your body stays at a very delicate temperature. And then the rest is work. And we didn't need to be able to be more efficient because also actually, if you look at it more from my evolutionistic perspective, one of the things that I was really fascinated doing research

into Tokyo Olympics, where we knew that it was very hot. Instead of going by necessarily that, okay, we need a cooling vest, we need air conditions and all these kind of things, I knew that, well, there are tribes. There are people, native people around in the world. They go out in a daytime and they hunt down animals in the scorching sun. They're able to survive this.

And what I found there is that, of course, I've been written book, books about this as well. And that is that you basically see that humans are probably one of the most superior species in exactly also heat management, which allows us basically to track down and hunt animals that are much faster than us. But we do have endurance because we're able to dissipate the heat and

we can just go on and go on and go on and go on. Those animals can't dissipate heat. They ultimately, they're completely keel over and the human wins the persistent hunt. That is the evolutionary advantage right there. You just explained it. Yeah, it's amazing. I come from a swimming background. And obviously, when you're in the pool, even if the water is somewhat warm, it's much cooler

than your core body temperature. So your body is expending a lot of energy just to maintain core temperature, which is why I think swimming is so exhausting. But also why you can spend a lot of time in the pool. Like you can keep swimming for extended periods of time because you're not going to overheat in the way that you would running. But ultimately, I find you

get more tired. Like, you know, the sleep is deeper and you walk around like a zombie. You're overdoing it in the pool. The interesting thing is that exactly for the same reason that you say there is that because here the water is taking so much energy from your body because the body needs to ramp up the heat production. The gross efficiency in cycling, you'll see that

it's typically sits for a liter around 20, 20, 21%. For sub-leases, actually, it's a little bit lower. When I started to work with Christian, we saw that his biochemical efficiency, I distinguish between biochemical and biomechanical. Gross efficiency is for me like where you measure from calimetry to velocity. While you can separate it into biomechanical, we're just looking at mechanical power to velocity. That's where you get

your biochemical efficiency. And this is where Christian, when I met him, he had a biochemical efficiency of around 17%. Now it sits around 19, 20%. But one thing that we see that that's for cycling. In swimming, it's between 5% to 10%. So there you see that basically only 5% to 10% of the calories that you're inputting are getting out in terms of velocity. And the rest

is pure heat because the body needs to use a lot more energy. To basically make sure that you don't get to go into hypothermia. Wow, that's wild. How does heart rate variability play into this as a valid data point? I'm not so much. It's interesting because I'm saying that, sorry, interrupt. But because we're all keen on the wearables and I've got the whoop and all that

kind of stuff. Suddenly, there's a discourse around heart rate variability. That didn't even exist like two years ago, unless somebody had your kind of background. For me, heart rate variability is like a very isolated or small metric. Of course, on the one side, we say that it's representative to the nervous system or it gives a representation of the nervous system. But I do think that, so

HIV obviously is a result of something. You can see that, of course, that it becomes more that your heart rate more like beats like very much more like a clock. Which is not too good. You want to do dance around a little bit. But on the other side, you don't want to do dance too much around either, which is not too good. So there is like

a delicate balance in between. But as a predictor of readiness and your capacity to endure strain on that particular day, the interesting thing is that if you had measured the, there's so small adjustments you can do and it will start to affect HIV. So for example, because we collect so much data, we can start to look at it over time. Not only just there, the spot

picture, but basically from also how every workout even affects it and both in the workout but also between the workouts and so. And one of the things that we do, I see when I've been looking at the data, is that if you do, for example, you can go into workout, you feel like you're not good at all. You look at the HIV and it says, okay,

that you see that maybe there are some indicators also indicating that. But just simply, also breathing exercises can sometimes make a difference to your HIV. That's for one, your perception. But also when you do a warmup, if you do a good, like a controlled, good warmup, suddenly also the HIV can be completely different also afterwards. So letting the HIV, that's why I'm very afraid of letting

the HIV dictate what you should do. Because it's, then you are, then instead of trying to do something with it, you're just letting the past dictate a little bit what's going to happen. So for me, HIV, it's, it's an interesting metric, but it's not only metric that I would guy used to basically determine something, it's more something I would say that if an athlete's FILS of

TIG, we also see, okay, let's try to do something that we know normally seems to get you into a state where you actually start to feel ready again. I would rather go by the feeling of the athlete. Then going by HIV, HIV would not even be the second metric I would look at. Okay, first the feeling of that, like then the HIV, it's comes fairly long

down the road before I would start to consider. You know, I have a habit of not like checking the data. In the morning, because I don't want it to be a predictor of what I'm supposed to do, which is sort of weird because it's kind, that's kind of what it's meant to do. But if I feel a little off and I know I've got a bunch

of stuff I got to do, you know, on that day, I don't want to look at it and have it tell me like I shouldn't do those things or that, you know, that you, so there's a weird mental thing. I think that happens with that as well. For me, if you had an electrical car, the problem with the human body is that we don't have like

any goji sonar where we can just look at our hand and it basically says, okay, you're recharged this much, for example. And also, a lot of the metrics that we have today, they are not really, they are like very isolated, very isolated metrics. And the problem with that is that it's like if you have electrical car, you drive during the day and in reality, you're using

20% battery. You come back home, you put it to charging and you're charging. The next day you expect it to be 100% again. You go to work again, spending another 20% back home, putting it to charging again. Every day you do this. But let's say that there was something wrong. And actually the input to your car was only 10% during that night. That means that after

a certain amount of days, your car will actually run out of electricity. For use, when you're sitting there, because you don't have a, let's say, in this car, you don't have the indicators. Now, in the same way that we don't have this clear indicator, you're sitting there wondering what on earth did go wrong with my car today. Obviously, there you can bring it to the workshop

and they will immediately say, oh, you're able to battery it. Unfortunately, that's much more complicated with the body. You can't basically just say that, okay, now I'm over-trained or like this or something like this. It's so much more difficult to predict the performance or predict whether overtraining all the things occur. For me, one of the best recovery predictors is more that you have to look at

things from a day-to-day basis. So for example, if you see that, for example, your general mood and every, like these kind of things are in general, they are, yes, they will fracture that a little bit. But you basically are, you see that you look forward to get out in the exercise or exercise in your scan thing, especially when you come back. You basically see that, for

example, the power, you're outputting the speed that you're outputting compared to your feeling in the body, compared to your heart rate and other things. You basically see that it looks good and maybe even improving, improving. But it also resembles the feeling that you have in your body. That is for me the single best predictor of that you are in a place where you're recovering sufficiently in

these kind of things. So rather looking at the trends and how you, how you progress according to plan and these kind of things, that is for me the single best predictor compared to any other metric that are available on the market. We're running out of time. I know you guys got another appointment. You got to go. I feel like we're an hour and a half into

what could be a five hour conversation, because I barely even started with all the things that I want to know about from you. But before I let you go, I do want to dive a little bit more in detail into the world of recovery. Obviously, an athlete's ability to recover in between training sessions is perhaps the most important thing that's going to predict success to the

extent that you can enhance recovery and compress the amount of time required for an athlete to bounce back. In between those training sessions, that's going to translate into performance gains realize sooner rather than later. So how do you think about recovery? What are the pillars of recovery that you can get from the recovery? That you think are important and what are some things that perhaps a

lot of athletes out there spend a lot of time thinking about that maybe are less important? Listening to the body I think is probably very underrated and learning to listen to your body is so interesting. But that's because there are two extremely important data stream. One is objective, qualitative, no quantitative data. On the other side, you have the qualitative data stream basically meaning from, and that's

also, there's something that you have to invest in and you have to train. And you can of course use that you will gain strength and you will be able to advance faster, connecting it with the objective or quantitative data stream. But learning to listen to your body and also having patience knowing that, okay, if I rush it today, yes, I have a competition coming up in

two weeks. But if you rush it on a hard session today, that might actually be more fatal. Yeah, to the end result, then actually just say that, okay, today I'm a little bit unsecure. I go out, I go easy a little bit. I feel how my body responds. If it's not there, I'm just going to do a little bit, go back and make sure that I'm

ready for the next session again. Because one single session will not make a big difference to the increase in your performance, but it can be enough to basically tip the whole result off in two weeks time if you really, if you start to rush it. Right. I think that decision has a lot to do. With where the athletes head is at and how confident or unconfident

they are about the upcoming event. That's why I think it's also important to have somebody to discuss the training with also because they can maybe be the one that I able to bring that perspective into your life as well. But among those pillars, I suspect sleep is at the top of the food chain there. Yes, sleep nutrition obviously is extremely important. We don't believe very much

in supplementation or things like, I'm again, I'm very demand-oriented, meaning that if you take a supplement, it should be because you have the doctor or somebody have identified that you are lacking something here. And you will try to compensate it by, for example, go to altitude, use iron supplementation. If you live in the Nordics, you alone vitamin D, okay, try to supplement with vitamin D and

see if it makes a change. But we don't use, we actually don't use supplements beyond actually what you eat as a normal food. And if you eat nice varied food, healthy foods, not obsessing of it because calories again is very important to get in. So if you're only eating salads and all these kind of things, obviously you're going to have to eat a table of salad

to maybe even be close. So again, calories is super important, sleep is super important, but also being in a place where you are able to recover mentally too is very important. And I think that in the end it boils down to choices. If you really want to excel, you prioritize it. Otherwise you're cheating yourself. We talked about aerodynamics with the labs earlier. If you got a

question, I was going to hear about that, just listen to that conversation. That was a whole other rabbit hole I wanted to dive down with you, but I do have to let you go. I appreciate how open and transparent you've been with all the modalities and techniques that you're playing around with. Like you're very open to discussing these things and not worried about other coaches figuring

out what your recipe is. But I'm sure you've got a whole other batch of stuff that you're up to that is under, you know, lock and key. And it is, top secret. But what would be like what's the next like if you had to design the optimal study to solve whatever dilemma is playing out in your mind about how to unlock ultimate human performance. Like what

would that look like? Like what are you thinking about now? Where is your, you know, training mindset evolving towards? So this is where probably I would have to apply the same thing that I like to apply to my athletes and that is sharing something sharing your competitive advantage. But it boils down to the double label water and maximum sustainable energy expenditure. Because on the one side,

we see that there is a very tight correlation between performance and volume. Volume is a very gross, gross estimate of what you're doing. It doesn't say something about the work. Obviously, because there's a lack of intensity, you can do 20 hours of training at 100 watts. You can go 20 hours of training at 200 watts. And that has at least a double amount of energy expanded.

So maybe even or better predictor of performance is expected to understand rather it from a telemetric perspective, how much or from a distance power, whatever kilojoules distance perspective, but maximum sustainable energy expenditure, understanding actually how we can even advance this. Because there are, this is something that humanity have tried to understand for decades. And that is what are the limits to performance. We have said view

to Max and threshold and all these kind of things. But in reality, it's like expected, you also pinpoint. Yeah, but you see some people that can do this for 30 minutes. You see some can do it for two hours. Yes, exactly. That's because we are all very often when we look at performance, we only quantify the mass power metrics and not capacity metrics. And that is

also the thing here is that I think that maybe one of the single best predictors of performance is maximum sustainable energy expenditure. And we in literature and research have been done on two the France riders during two, yeah, during two the France, Giro d'Italia, ultra runners and so on. They basically see that there seems to be a limitation around 2.5 times the resting metabolic rate. We

know from the studies we have done that we are at a much higher number. And so then you can ask, okay, so what? Basically, if you if you have one hour to train per week and that comes back again, we can if you plot you on your performance, you're going to run Boston marathon or whatever. Most likely your performance will be accordingly. If you have a

20 hours of training, your performance will be much better, most likely. And then the question is, well, where's the limit? So if there's a correlation going up and you can get better and better, I already know that these guys, Gustav and Christian are putting down a huge amount of work. Yeah, work is probably the right word. Measuring kilo juice, kilo calories. And my question now is

just how can we really now start to manipulate the training and maybe we are on a verge of starting to put training to get in a different way? We don't have the answers. We just have to do the research. We have to take the risk of experiment. We have to take the risk of the experiment. And then we have to take the risk of the experiment.

And we have to take the risk of the experiment. And then the question is, what are we going to do? And that puts higher demand on recovery, sleep, eat, how you put together the training and everything. So that is for me now. It might, when we sit down and talk again, this perspective might have changed because we have gone even further down the time. You've explored

it more than we play at that time. But that's where I'm now. Right. But we're nowhere near the limit. Right. You know that. We know that. And that means that we've got exciting times to come. You know, you guys are hard at work at this. And I can't wait to see, you know, how this plays out in the years to come. So I got to let

you go. Please consider this part one of a multi part series. Come back. Because I got a million more questions for you. And it's just fascinating what you're doing. I appreciate the work you're doing and for taking the time to share with us today. I accept already. Alright. Excellent. And cool. I'll let you guys go. Thank you for an amazing day. All of you guys. And

best of all. And please, if there's anything I can do for any of you, consider me and my team here resource. Thank you so much. Cheers. I'm so honored. Yeah. The honor is all my, my friend. Cheers. Peace. That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed

today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the link. You can find the entire podcast archive as well as podcast merch, my books, finding ultra, voicing change and the plant power way, as well as the plant power meal planner at meals.ritroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on

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